The first time Melinda Young went to a Passover seder, the hosts put an individual seder plate at each place setting.
Assuming this arrangement of symbolic foods comprised the entire meal, Young, a lapsed Catholic who lives in Austin, Texas, remembers looking at the plate thinking, “OK, there’s a piece of matzah, a boiled egg — and I don’t think there’s any meat on that bone.”
When the matzah ball soup came she downed two portions, convinced it would be the last food she’d see for hours.

The idea that God is a “person with whom people can have a relationship” seems right out of Evangelical Christianity.
Yet a new study of religion in America finds that a full quarter of Jews believe in such a personal relationship.
Is that figure high or low, and is it good for the Jews?

All eyes now turn to Jerusalem. Not satisfied with Pope John Paul II’s general apology to the world on Sunday, some Jewish leaders are hoping the pontiff will come through with an unprecedented and specific declaration about Christian responsibility for the Holocaust and 2,000 years of anti-Semitic acts when he visits the Yad Vashem memorial next Thursday.
He will meet with survivors from the Polish town of Wadowice, where the Pope was born 79 years ago.